Weekly posts
One story a week
Every week, one labor story told for Instagram and archived here in full. Swipeable on the feed. Readable in full on the site.
September 14, 2026
She Built the Boycott. Then She Sat Down and Closed the Deal.
Everyone knows the UFW won the grape boycott. Almost no one knows who sat across from the growers in the summer of 1970 and closed the contracts. It was Dolores Huerta, the same woman who had spent four years building the consumer boycott infrastructure that made the growers' position untenable. This is about the room, not the march.
September 7, 2026
Seven Fingers on Glenwood Street
On September 7, 1965, Larry Itliong called a vote at Filipino Community Hall in Delano. He had been striking since he was a teenager: lettuce in Washington, salmon canneries in Alaska, asparagus in California. The vote was unanimous, and the next morning roughly a thousand Filipino farmworkers walked out. The long-form drops Tuesday. This companion tells you whose room it was.
August 31, 2026
The Holiday He Built to Make You Forget
On June 28, 1894, Grover Cleveland signed Labor Day into law. Five days later he sent federal troops to Chicago. Nine days after that, as many as 30 workers were dead. The September date was not an accident. It was a political calculation to sever American workers from the international socialist movement that had already claimed May 1. This is the ground on which Cleveland built the holiday.
August 24, 2026
The Vote That Wasn't Cast
On August 12, 1963, Walter Reuther moved inside the AFL-CIO executive council for a full federation endorsement of the March on Washington. A. Philip Randolph, the man who had spent 22 years building toward the march, cast the only supporting vote. The long-form drops Friday, August 28, with the full story of what the march asked for and what organized labor left on the table.
August 17, 2026
The Army Came to West Virginia, and the Miners Didn't Flinch
On August 1, 1921, Baldwin-Felts detectives murdered Sid Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers on the courthouse steps while both men's wives stood next to them. Within weeks, roughly 10,000 armed miners, Black and white and immigrant, marched on Logan County. The president sent the Army. Private planes dropped bombs. This is the story of the largest armed labor uprising in American history after the Civil War, and why almost nobody knows it.
August 10, 2026
The Book That Killed the Bracero Program
The standard telling jumps from a CBS documentary to Chavez at Delano. The honest telling names the union man in the middle: Ernesto Galarza, who lost sixteen years of strikes to bracero strikebreakers, picked up a pen, and wrote the book that made Delano possible.
August 3, 2026
The Rose Garden, 11 a.m., August 3, 1981
PATCO endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980. In August 1981 he fired 11,345 of them and banned them from federal service for life. The firings were legal. They were also a choice, and that choice opened the door for the private-sector union-busting that defined the decade.
July 27, 2026
Twelve Years to the Day: The Porters Win a Contract
On August 25, 1925, roughly 500 porters gathered in Harlem and picked a leader. On August 25, 1937, twelve years to the day, Pullman signed. It covers the arithmetic the porters were living inside before that signature, and what the Ladies' Auxiliary did to get them there.
July 20, 2026
The Washing Society: Atlanta, July 1881
Atlanta was selling itself to Northern capital as the New South. The International Cotton Exposition was eleven weeks out. And three thousand Black women, most of them born into slavery, held the city's laundry hostage and forced the city council to kill its own retaliation tax.
July 13, 2026
The Funeral That Called a General Strike
The San Francisco Labor Council did not want a general strike in July 1934. The rank and file called one anyway, one union at a time, and the Labor Council chased them into it. This week: what happens when the workers are five moves ahead of the leadership.
July 6, 2026
The Cook Who Died for the Longshoremen
He was not a longshoreman. He was a Greek immigrant cook bringing food to picketing dockworkers when San Francisco police shot him dead on July 5, 1934. For ninety-one years the ILWU has claimed him as one of its own, because that is what a union is.
June 29, 2026
The Continental Congress of the Working Class
On June 27, 1905, a Catholic priest, a Black anarchist organizer, a socialist railway man out of federal prison, and a miner holding a loose board for a gavel opened a convention in Chicago that declared, in its first sentence, that workers and bosses have nothing in common.
June 22, 2026
She Came Home With a Nursing License. They Hired Her as a Maid.
Mary Moultrie trained as a licensed practical nurse in New York and came back to Charleston in 1967 to find her home-state hospital would not recognize the credential. What they did give her was a grievance specific enough to build a local around, and a strike that held for 113 days. The long-form drops Saturday.
June 15, 2026
Stonewall Was a Workers' Riot
The people at the front of the Stonewall crowd were sex workers, bar staff, and homeless queer kids whose labor the state had criminalized. The bar was a Mafia bottle club because New York refused to license it. The cops took a cut, and raided it anyway. That is a labor story.
June 8, 2026
They Killed the Singing Widow
On September 14, 1929, a mob of Loray Mill employees shot Ella May Wiggins dead in broad daylight in front of more than 50 witnesses. A North Carolina jury acquitted every one of them in under 30 minutes. Her crime was organizing Black and white Southern textile workers into the same union, and writing songs nobody could forget.
June 1, 2026
The Women Who Ran Lawrence
In nine weeks in 1912, 20,000 immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, speaking more than two dozen languages, shut down the largest woolen company in America. The ones holding it together were the women.
May 25, 2026
Little Steel Was Not a Size. It Was a Cartel.
On March 2, 1937, US Steel signed with the union. Five other steelmakers closed ranks and decided to fight instead. They had a name for themselves. They had an arsenal. They had Tom Girdler. The massacre came eight weeks later.
May 18, 2026
The Ford Fight Was Won With a Camera
On May 26, 1937, Harry Bennett's men beat Walter Reuther and Richard Frankensteen bloody on a pedestrian overpass outside Ford's Rouge plant. They beat them in front of a Detroit News photographer. The photographer hid the negatives under his back seat. The photograph is the reason Ford signed.
May 11, 2026
Pullman, 1894: How the Federal Government Learned to Break a Strike
The Pullman Strike of 1894 taught the federal government two things it never forgot. A court injunction plus the Sherman Antitrust Act could break any strike by paper, without firing a shot. And a union that drew a color line handed the bosses a strikebreaking force for free. Every labor injunction since runs on the same chassis.
May 3, 2026
Why Overtime Pay Exists
Overtime pay isn't a bonus. It's a fine levied against employers for trying to work you past forty hours a week, and it exists because working people fought for fifty years to make it expensive to kill them.
May 1, 2026
The Holiday US Workers Built Was May 1. The One the State Gave Them Was September.
May Day was set in Chicago in 1884 and kept by 80-some countries ever since. The United States put its own labor holiday in September instead, and signed the bill six days before federal troops broke the Pullman Strike. The date on your calendar is not neutral. It never was.